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1) It has been said that God has spoken to the human race in many ways & by various means throughout the eons. This includes
the likes of Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Martin Luther, Baha'u'llah & many others who attempted with various levels
of success to bring some fresh perspectives to spiritual matters.
2) To start off the new millennium, several
men & women will step up to the plate & start telling things as they see it. We are doing this as we feel people have
been conditioned for far too long to accept things that aren't always true. We are out to teach people how to think as opposed
to telling them what to think. To defeat the "one size fits all" mentality in today's world, we are taking on all
the inconsistencies we can find & show humanity what these paradoxes actually look like. Our church or spiritual movement,
if you wish, will be called Church of Logical Absurdities or CoLA for short. Not to be a non-prophet organization, we will
have the ghost of William Gaines the creator of MAD Magazine, George Carlin, Groucho Marx, among others with their permission,
acting as resident sooth-sayers.
3) CoLA will be a satirical group showing the absurdities of organized religion.
Considering how much absurdities abound in religion, we will be quite busy & we will attempt to take them all on. Nothing
will be taken on faith & we will have no sacred cows in our movement. People can feel free to become members of our church
providing the person has some form of skeptical attitude or organized religion & has a fine sense of the absurd.
4) The mainstays of CoLA are "Doc" Murdock, The Shadow Keeper,& "Gumby" Ireland. We will be taking
turns doing sermons on various subjects to make spiritual connections never thought to have existed before. Guest speakers
are welcome & encouraged to contribute material as long as it is on spiritual matters & from an informative or satirical
angle. Will we have music? Of course! Hymns & H(y)ers will be part of our agenda. So please feel free to send any material
along that line too. Like any other religion we will need commandments. We will start our commandments with "Thou Shall"
instead of "Thou Shall Not." To defy superstitious thinking we will have 13 commandments.
5) Some
topics we are working on are as follows.
a) A popularity contest between Superman & The Pope; a look into
brain stem or spinal cord research. One may remember Christopher Reeve who once starred as Superman in the movie, now confined
to a wheelchair.
b) Riding a Harley Davidson as a spiritual experience.
c) Spirituality from
sailing the high seas.
d) The opening line of the Bible is "In the beginning, God created the Heavens
& the Earth." This seems to indicate a starting point in history. If this is true, what was God doing prior to this
starting point & where was he or she?
e) Since organized religion is supposed to be into family values,
why don't they have God the Mother along with God the Father, God the Son & God the daughter? Or God the Dog, God the
Cat or God the Budgie? It is to wonder what organized religion isn't telling us.
f) People currently involved
with a particular faith, what they found in it, how it helps in the day to day aspects of their life & why they have stayed
with it. Others may tell stories of why they have left one faith for another or just have plain left organized religion behind.
g) Religious rituals seen from a child's eyes & why they think adults do the things they do in religious ceremonies.
h) The Religious Hall of Shame.
i) Snappy answers to religious clichs.
j) The
Shadow Keeper knows what lurks beneath the religious veneer.
k) Spiritual nudity. The gist of this sermon
focuses on the story of the Garden of Eden. Adam & Eve were naked until they were talked into eating fruit from the Tree
of Knowledge by Satan posing as a talking snake of all things. When Adam & Eve realized they were naked they covered themselves
with fig leaves & hid among the bushes. When God went looking for them & found out they were no longer naked, He/She
got pretty choked. So it got me thinking that nudity is of God, therefore no shame is to be attached to it & how clothing
may have originally been a satanic plot to disrupt God's plan for men & women. Of course for those of us who live in colder
climates for six months of the year, we are going to opt for some clothing.
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